Davy Crockett's Riproarious Shemales and Sentimental Sisters: Women's Tall Tales from the Crockett Almanacs (1835-1856)

xvii, 334 pp. Conceived as a marketing device by nineteenth-century publishers hoping to gain a share of the lucrative almanac market, The Crockett Almanacs became the best-selling and longest-running series of comic almanacs published in the United States before the Civil War. Michael Lofaro explores one of the Almanacs' most entertaining and intriguing aspects: the adventures of backwoods women. Their portrayals, which range from the heroic to the satiric, from the comic to the sentimental, create uproarious laughter and provoke serious commentary-often in the same tale.